Surrender
by goldenmeadow
Summary: 'And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.' Edward left. Bella changed. He came back. Who will surrender? Bitterly cold, achingly ardent. AU/M.
1. Surrender

I love my Vi! Needless to say, I had the most hardcore withdrawals from **Viola Cornuta and all my DW gals **for FIVE long days. Ta, Vi. You get my rocks off, I can't even really express how you bring perfection to my paltry words, and of course for the Anais Nin quote.

**Disclaimer: **MINE! And yours? Shall we call it ours and be good? Twilight, etc., belongs to SM. _There, I said it._

~~Here's what happened: I was up late, listening to a song (All Saints, _Surrender)._ I'd missed writing my oneshots for the Twi 25 Challenge so ran with this. I'm sending it out to everyone of y'all who gave such beautiful, heart-felt Christmas wishes to me and each other while I was away~~

* * *

**Surrender**

_And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.  
_Anais Nin~

Him.

There.

Sharp.

Clean.

Tangy like the round Clementines I'd find in the foot of my stocking.

Charcoal and black as the cold lumps laid on top.

For I was a bad girl.

_~~ll~~_

Meaty.

Sustenance.

I was no little girl.

Sugar plums and faeries?

_Not for me._

A limp festive wish was squandered under my breath, Christmas morn. Mourning.

There was nothing beneath the fresh cut, Douglas Fir tree I wanted.

Charlie passed me presents wrapped in leavings of newspaper. His bows created from red ripped-off ribbon from the Diner's takeout boxes.

Renee trilled and waltzed, an elf with no footing in this world.

Jacob and Billy were little more than totems to my past.

The tree inscribed with my twenty years; portraits, paintings, Shrinky Dinks – _ha! I knew enough about those from Mike Newton! One look at his bared eye-of-newt thrusting back up into his crotch was enough to make me understand he was nothing but a boy. Looked like a fucking woodchuck…I'd told him 'no' as gently as possible. _I had no wish to break his heart, but neither did I want Mike-fucking-Newton to be the man to break me in.

Giving my reticent thanks, glassing over others' gratitude, tugging Jake's girly locks and pressing a kiss to Charlie's cheek, hugging Renee, my obligations were met.

Rummaging through the hall closet, I found my skates. Pulling on legwarmers and fingerless black gloves, I snapped my down vest over my chest.

Forks sucked. Drab, discolored, bleached, bleak. I wished for the dangerous pandemonium of Edward's and my love.

The loss of _his_ love had killed me.

From a shroud of bereavement, wearing a wimple of novice strength like a mark over my head, I'd risen like Lazarus from comatose caterwauling that had gone on for more months than I wanted to count.

This year I felt different.

I was waiting to be unwrapped.

The woman I was meant to be lingered inside, floating to the edges of my full body, tickling at my personality, wanting to shed the cotton cocoon whose cynical shell sheltered me from further pain. Secreting a transformation I felt.

It'd take a monsoon of monstrous emotion to rip away this carapace. To lay bare the person I might yet become instead of the seventeen-year-old girl whose heart had been shattered like bone china so fine it was transparent.

A touch, a pristine, clear, early summer daybreak to unfold my new wings from dewy webbing, to melt off the terrible frostbite of my soul. To give me yearning, need that could be soothed. Like a Luna Moth…to mate once, to die, knowing once again enormous love.

Anything close to what Edward and I'd had would rebirth me and, _ultimately_, be the end of me.

I didn't think any such thing would happen in Forks.

Perhaps nowhere. _Never again_.

My soft underbelly had become more and more unguarded as the winter months drifted over us, pillowing my sea-change in snow, frost, icicles fourteen inches long hanging from the eaves in melting _plip plop plip_ daggers. All one had to do was poke me with an icy stalactite in just the right place to puncture me. Then what would be found? The same fucking futile pain that had washed over me like coldest December sleet?

Or was an unsullied layer beneath?

The death of our love was altering me.

Mikey met me with a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate at the frozen pond, fashioned by the elders' shovels moving snow banks from the clouded slate surface.

A marshmallow melted inside the pebbly cup.

It reminded of the touch of his paltry cock and soft skin…Mike's body somewhat pathetic.

Fishing shacks sat over augured holes, and I knew the Quileutes pow-wowed inside those tight sauna-like sweat lodges, pulling up wide mouth bass, tanking back Ranier, toking spliffs.

The treaty meant nothing anymore.

_He was gone._

I laced my ice skates and tested the blades against my thumb and forefinger until I drew blood.

Christly Christmas carols saturated their cloying noise to my mind.

_I hated this shit._

Sitting on the bench, bracing my blades to glossy denuded gray surface, I blew across my cocoa and heard a rustling in the cedar cloisters behind me, tousling the twinkly lights chained around them.

_Fuck you._

He was inside me, unsettling me. For two years I'd excised _his presence_ from my thoughts, _his strokes, hands, fingers, mouth _from my membranes. This year, this time of year, this November and December, Edward's specter had returned to taunt me. Making me hot all the goddamn time! Every morning, noon, midday and night, I blanketed myself against withdrawal from his manly scent; the fresh cut lawn, the musk of animal, the ruby wine of his lips. As if he'd up and left two days ago, not three years and two goddamn agonizing months!

_All of him haunted me._

When I let myself think of him.

I lifted my hand and gave the ghost behind me the 'V'. For good measure, I stood precisely, turned, and raised my middle finger.

_Fuck. You._

He'd left.

Vespers to the wind.

Taking the love he'd promised.

Stealing away not only his gloriousness, the one fucking thing that had ripped the heart out of me, but also _his_ family.

_My family._

Now I had Charlie. Renee. Jacob. Mike. And my men, who needed me more than I wanted them.

_Was this really what Edward wished for me?_

I'd been a virgin aching for him alone.

I gave myself away instead. Physicalilty, _fucking_, grounded me. I wasn't a slut, I certainly had my standards, but neither was I holding out for that empirical first time. Vigilantly, I avoided the Tylers, the Jacobs, the Mikes. The stagnant ponds of the local high schools were most definitely off-limits.

Nonetheless I was a fatal blossom.

Nightshade.

Mistletoe.

No longer the unfurling lily whose pistil shook to a specific stamen.

I wanted.

So I had.

I didn't fool myself into thinking any of the men were replacements for Edward, I didn't have a Freudian father complex, I wasn't looking for _Daddy,_ I wasn't seeking anything other than pure bodily pleasure. _Love_, fuck that. I'd had it. Emotional entanglement? Well, I wasn't certain when I'd be ready for that shit either.

Sometimes, I just wanted to fuck.

I almost always wanted to bite and spit and punch and kick!

_Undeniably, when I bothered to look closely enough, I couldn't imagine giving my heart to anyone but him. And I just couldn't think about that._

I was becoming somebody else. I didn't look up my roster of rutting men, I stopped hooking up. This autumn-turned-winter was doing something to me.

_Was this it?_

_Was this my life?_

I lit a smoke and ignored the glare of family man Jenks with his duckling brood, Sue Clearwater's disapproving glance. _Please. 'S'okay to toke up in the name of the wolfpack, but not for l'il old left-by-the-wayside Bella?_

Dragging deeply, I swallowed the pleasant burn of nicotine and my lungs losing elasticity. Banner'd taught me well.

Through my nose, I blew a stream, straight at corpulent Mrs. Cope. She'd always hankered after Edward.

_As if._

Making spirals and circles, I punctuated the air with my Marlboros, looped my scarf back around my throat and neck, rubbed my ears, and checked behind me one more time.

_No one was here._

_~~ll~~_

Turning about the rink, I laughed at the little kids with the double-bladed skates, their knocking knees and slip-sliding.

"Miss Bella! Miss Bella!" Young William Cheney toddled over to me. I pocketed my gloves because I needed to feel the plump hills of his childish hands. Holding out my fingers, I brought his tickly woolen mittens into my palms, gliding backwards as I towed him slowly with me in ever widening spirals. A two-year-old rough and tumble boy, his willful personality reminded me of Jasper, his amusing antics made memories of Emmett flock over me, his shock of carroty hair and the deep brown eyes startled with flecks of gold caused my heart to keen for the human boy Edward had been. In life, with his mother and father…perhaps he'd skated with them on Lake Michigan.

_How could I blame him, still? _

Another layer of my cosseting casing shredded to the gray surface as William's tiny, mighty hand tightened and curled in excitement inside mine.

Mirth was so embroiled in gravity all this time.

It must have felt the same for Edward one million times over.

A desire to simply love crippled by near ninety years feeling an emotionally impoverished creature torn from his parents, tossed to infinity.

I knew right fucking now, why he'd left. Even as William trilled and tittered in his preschooler's voice, a lisp of life that had so grated my nerves for two years now filling me with some odd, weird hope, dime-sized tears clouded my vision. _Love colliding with self-preservation and a cherished one's protection. From himself, because he'd always tried to underline the enormous, overpowering pull of my blood to his tongue and teeth and poison, a lunatic call, an addictive thrall, I'd just been too fucking naïve and willing to believe in the impossible, the fairytales, the classic romances wherein stories told of love conquering all!_

Round wet salt talked down my cheeks and sat like ruminations and reparations in the corners of my mouth.

_Edward had lost his life and his mortal family in one night._

_Edward had awoken as another being after three goddamn days of wracking anguish! Edward had subsumed the villain inside him, replaced human flow with animal, like a person sucking O2 from a tank instead of clean air exhaled from the trees. Edward had walked for decades, alone, while his family grew, two-by-two, inhabiting the Cullen ark. _

_Edward had felt repletion, battling beastly wishes, with me._

_Edward had kissed me, the first woman in all his life._

_He'd held me, tenderly. Touched me as forcibly as he could. _

_Edward had given up his soul…so he could meet me eighty-seven later._

_Edward had loved me so fucking much he'd left! _

_Cracking his _own_ heart, denying any human comfort, foregoing possession, forsaking the one time, the one most vital emotion superseding all his other inclinations. To keep. Me. Safe. _

A harrowing open hole, my mouth worked and gasped, and my throat swallowed ancient ache and tears. Unleashing William, I watched him flounder to the banister where he was caught in the welcoming embrace of Angela and Ben**.**

In the middle of the pond, I stood with my arms out from my sides, my feet firmly planted apart, my mind elsewhere, my insides bleeding.

_He'd loved me too much to stay._

_Edward had honored me so very much, he'd ingested his own guilt instead of my blood, staked his own heart instead of taking up any more residence in mine, gone off to some fucking god forsaken no man's land to allow me…life._

When my sight cleared, glacial rivers of dried weeping sleeping over my face, I was punched in the gut.

I questioned my sanity.

It wasn't the first time.

From behind the bench I'd sat upon fuming, noxious and angry, Edward shouldered apart the trees with his spacious torso. His hair picked up firelight, in direct contrast to the foliage behind him, lifting and whipping spiritedly in the chill wind racing down from the north.

Against the amber of his timeless eyes, I thought I saw glimmers of jade, damp and mossy dark. Almost wet. And he fucking pierced me straight through!

My figure skates sliced into ice as I braced myself.

My body trembled like the last leaf to fall from a maple.

Silence was all I heard.

I steadied myself, pulled my gloves out and rained them with the tears still leaking from eyes, rubbing out an hallucination that couldn't be real.

_If he was here, no fucking way was I going to faint!_

Steeled, stiff with irritation, I put my feet in motion and honed my blades on crusty ice as I made my way to where he stood.

This man who believed himself a beast. This boy who'd broken my heart. This vampire who'd turned my world from what was real and banal to insanely, complicatedly surreal.

Even I heard my heart choralling like a fucking tympani. Pushing off a fresh heave of snow from the railing, I curled my fingers around it and glared not at my Edward, but a novel Edward, lounging just beyond. Thudding with another pulse of emotion, my heart rattled my ribcage, trying to cavort through skin and bones to find the clutch of his hands.

He heard it too for he smiled in a new fashion, with his lips open, the sculpted red so hot-cold, lush and curvy. No more half-smile.

Narrowing my eyes, I questioned him mutely with a twitch of an eyebrow…one of the many tricks I'd learned from him. _Just because I suddenly, intimately and hurtfully understood his intentions, three long fucking years ago, didn't mean I'd forgive him with just one insouciant lip lift!_

He was so ripe. Even dead for a century, nearly, Edward was more alive than me at this moment.

His cheeks were ruddy, his lips like Macintosh's, his eyes apples dipped in caramel. Feeling heightened his usually alabaster unscathed complexion.

As I observed, I shifted back, back, back. Away from him, the feeling he detonated inside me, the finger of dawn I'd been waiting for.

The crescent moon spun white gold across skeletal clouds and midnight sky. Its light precipitated shafts that made landfall between us like stepping stones.

He didn't walk.

Neither did he skate.

He glided gracefully while I shook and rooted like an igloo, my feet blocks of ice.

_Was he real?_

_Had he ever been real?_

His frigid fingers were a mockery of weather, because he bore hoarfrost in his veins. His heart was a lockbox filled with sheared snow.

I felt so jaded, stripped, desperate.

I opened up as parasitic ivory-yellow mistletoe. Every single hurt sank inside my belly again.

I'd hardened into a landlocked burned arbor.

Opening. Closing. Yes, and no.

One look, one stroking finger imploded inside my gut, ejaculated out my mouth, I burnt my lips against my hot chocolate, the gooey marshmallow soldered to my tongue! My hands gripped air, not daring to reach.

_Edward! Was he here?_

Three years and too many months had passed while I'd lamented him.

_Why? Why now?_

I was almost fucking over him.

I was beginning to feel something fresh!

_I was starting to heal._

Mittens, down coats, snowbanks, snow angels…he was at one…he looked at peace for the first time.

I was a yearling. Young and fresh and innocent and untarnished again.

He took my fag from my fingers, snuffed the smoldering butt, tossed it to the glassy pond with a sizzle.

My hands shook as I lifted another from my pocket.

_This was the climatic change that had been weathering about me. My remains understood what I could never foresee. Edward had been coming for me._

Glaring at him, challenging him, guarding myself beneath a habit I'd taken up to loosen my thoughts, let go him when he'd foregone me.

_I fucking dare you, Edward._

This was one time I wished he could read my mind.

Inside the expensive depths of his coat, he pulled out a lighter. Tugging the fibrous tip from my lips, he snugged it to his own mouth. He cupped his hand round the flame and lit the paper as a candle wick.

He took in a pull of tobacco first before placing the filter between my lips. Tobacco and Edward was a heady combination.

The taste of his tongue still hooked to the cigarette. I lolled his essence against my taste buds.

There'd always been safety in Edward, so I'd thought.

Now there was an air of rebelliousness. A look of danger. A crook of confidence having more to do with self-awareness than being the top of the food chain.

_A man in his own right._

He watched me smoke as if it were foreplay, and still not one fucking word was spoken between us.

Where was the concern for my _frail_ well-being?

Where was his fetish to be in control?

The man I'd known hadn't allowed himself this splendid sensual edge; he'd contained his sexuality like it was the dirtiest secret known to man! As if the abundant hormonal tendencies of a seventeen-year-old boy were nearly as condemnable as being a vampire bred of cold catacombs and fed on life's essence alone.

Edward looked more relaxed. Impossibly, he appeared taller. Older _and_ more youthful. More powerful in body and mind. His lips curled up with my scrutiny in eroticism instead of defeat, cynicism, sardony. His chest seemed broader, his thighs mightier, his hair completely undomesticated, his eyes a darker bullion in the bonfire's glow.

Surely he was a figment; too little sleep, too much laced eggnog.

Skating away, I stopped, center ring.

_I'd been fleeced._

Asshole!

_Man I'd loved!_

_Vampire I'd wanted to mate, how could he be here?_

I watched with sickening fascination as he took to the pond. Accosted by Jessica even now, he was suave**.** Ever the gentleman, he spun her about like Dean to her less than sylphlike Torville**. **

He bowed and released her.

He started coming for me.

Pain and panic crashed, and I knew it was really him, "_FUCK!_"

He stopped short.

He seemed to want to touch but certainly wouldn't. Not with his manners and my attitude.

He wasn't quite waylaid though.

"You look older," stated simply in his deeply downy voice that always had – and always would – created a fluttery warbling in my belly and up through my chest. I fought for breath, and my face pinkened with more than blustery cold, I wasn't sure this was a compliment. Old Bella would have bristled to be reminded of the passage of years while he remained circumvented by Father Time, a stony statue encased in a glass coffin while civilization went on its brutal way. I wasn't sure if his regard was favorable until I caught the rapier of his gold-ore eyes moving over my figure, appreciating the new roundness to my breasts and hips, accentuating the smallest fine lines stitching creases in the corners of my eyes, intonations of my body speaking of the hourglass' ceaseless passage.

Proudly, standing taller, shaking my hair back over my shoulders, without timidity I spoke, "I am. _Older_."

Edward's lips pursed against a smile. A dimple prodded his carved cheek. The sexy goddamn divot in his chin prodded up. With a tug of his teeth to his lush bottom lip, he looked me over again, the slightest hint of admiration teasing every plane of his face.

_Ah, Edward's satisfied of this change in me._ But did I need his esteem? Did I want it, crave it…would I cry myself to sleep over it? _Not this time._

As if he could see the tumble of tumultuous thought in my head, he nodded in accord as if to say, _"Good."_

He'd only touched my cheek with one finger. Now his hands lingered down to his hips and I watched those digits slide into the waistband of his jeans, wondering at the skin inside, the secret tissue he was touching that I'd never had the privilege to look at, let alone caress. He fidgeted once, levering his weight from one foot to the other, running his thumbs under belt loops, thumbs I wanted splaying me open and sinking inside my hot slick flesh. I wondered if he was attempting to put me at ease with his mundane actions or if he really was…_nervous?_

"You look younger," I pronounced, and I boldly grabbed his wrist, massaging my thumb around his. "Well, I suppose you are my elder now," he winked, and his laugh was true, full, from inside! To hear such an exclamation made me chuckle too. I'd stepped closer. My cheek rubbed into his chest, scratching my smile into the wool of his pea coat. His hands freed from fiddling, I could have sworn they felt warm from their residence against his chrysalis muscles. _If only. If only Edward were human, like me._ Effortlessly, homing in, our hands clasped, fingers linked, a quavering breath tossed under the current of sudden belonging right fucking here, "_Oh God."_

His eyes closed, there was nothing frightening about Edward, not in this instant, not to me. There never fucking was…_not to me_. How, _HOW _could he have thought himself undeserving of me, of love, of a soul, of a complete life, of a human death?

_Why shouldn't he live forever? _

A moan mumbled through his tightly closed lips. His own breathing was severe and ragged. Raising his eyelids, his struggle subsided, leaving clarity and carnality and just the same damn thing I felt. _This was home._

_Too much. _

I wanted to go back to Zombie Bella. I wanted not to feel this! He'd promised I'd never see him again!

_I was almost over him._

Fool. _Foolish_. I might have moved on, but, _Jesus Christ,_ there'd always have been Edward, my twisted fairytale.

The extreme voltage running between us, a familiarly exciting current, burst the anxious levity.

Tugging away, tucking my hand in my pocket, grappling with my hot chocolate, I turned half away.

I blinked back radiating tears, but they came anyway, meeting vaporous cold and turning to frozen icy drops splattering humiliatingly down my face, "You know how much I loved you." It wasn't a question. It was a declaration.

Taking my elbow but not daring to turn me towards him, Edward asked grievously, "Loved?"

I bolted away again, because I couldn't do this with him touching me. _Loved. Love. Left. Lost._

_Found._

The crisp cold bloom on his cheeks turned ashen, foliage decaying to ground. Shaken and filled with onus, he was guilty. _He was fallible._ Edward was faulty. I laughed a little broken thing because, for all the time I'd thought him perfect, immaculate, unbreakable, I'd always known he was just as human as me. I just never realized until he deserted me he was capable of wounding _me._

It may not have been my blood he stole as he wanted to so many times -- a lethal terrifying yearning to feast from my arteries, a grotesque and morbid yen for my circulating liquid above all others -- but it was my heart. That organ that made my blood pump through fat plump veins.

Cocky and smirky and crooked smile took a backseat to years of desperation laden with hunt and want and malignance and desolation. Three years of the same fucking things I'd experienced until I was raw, bitten, bitter.

But he hadn't destroyed me. I was stronger, braver, more true to myself. Older, wiser, a little less gullible. A woman. One who'd loved and lost. One who'd gotten through it…_just_. I hadn't waited, I wasn't lost at sea…I was on the precipice of my life!

Fate was either bent and cruel, or benign and beautiful to deliver Edward to me at this precise moment.

Was he the morning's sunrise to melt away my sarcophagus? Or was this the most final goodbye?

Clearly wondering the same thing, Edward stood woodenly before me. Shoving my hands through the lengths of my hair, I coiled it over my shoulder. He watched each motion, his nostrils flaring, his eyes narrowing. I gulped down the last of my congealed cocoa, crushed the Styrofoam in my fist, skated off to throw it in the bin, came back.

_I want to touch him so much._

I couldn't.

"I don't regret it," I stated. Comprehension staggered both of us. I'd been so naïve, juvenile, and irresponsible. A follower, a sheep, not the lamb we'd thought I was.

Our sad somber smiles echoed each other.

"I've missed watching you grow, Bella," Edward was rasping each word as if to utter them grated his missile resistant skin. Torture evident in each syllable.

I surrendered my shellac shell. I let loose my fortress cemented with acrimony and bile. "I wouldn't have changed if you'd been here. Perhaps you were right to leave.

"I'm not sure I forgive you though," I followed up.

Bowing his head, Edward lifted his arm up to clasp his neck. The rings of skin where his fingertips clenched turned to white full moons.

_My man. He's so beautiful._

Weighty with anger at himself, Edward's eyes blacked out dense as gothic nightmares, "That makes two of us."

_Ease him. How can you hurt him so? How can you let him censure himself again?_

My soul pined to comfort him!

Approaching him, cutting my blades straight into the ice, I pushed up his shoulders, raised his chin, rubbed his jaw, placed my other hand against his neck, feeling the muscles tighten. _Oh, to touch Edward!_

The smile bursting upwards on my lips was uncontainable. "_To touch you!"_

"I've missed you, Edward." _I had. _

Overwhelming the suffering of abandonment was the sorrow of absence.

We had no fucking clue what we were doing. Not then, not now.

I guess I'd always thought Edward had a plan. A fail-safe. A way to make us work. I'd placed myself in his hands, at his disposal, thinking he would _always fucking know what to do!_

Jesus, I'd been so blind!

He turned into my palm and kissed me. The gentleness of it was a seamless sham to all the conquering emotions and desires battling between us.

"You've become a woman," tenderly, haltingly lest I pull away, he cupped my side and stroked up and down, his fingers to my back, his palm on my ribs, his thumb flickering to the underside of my breast and down to my hipbone. "Elegant…regal…real," each word punctuated by a sweet kiss to my forehead and both cheeks.

Unable to withhold himself another second, he framed my face suddenly and looked ardentlyto my eyes, darting his own down to my mouth, _"You are real."_ Instead of kissing me, he pressed our brows together and whispered, "All the time, _all that time,_ I was…how do you say it? Flying by the seat of my pants, Bella," he snickered, and I pressed my lips up to his to feel his next hush, "All I knew was that I loved you."

I pulled back with a quirked eyebrow, "Loved?"

Sheepishly, he grinned, a bit, "Love.

"_Love_, I had no idea how to be with you, keep you safe," with each phrase his body moved closer again until he was fully against me, "Not kill you with my thirst and lust," he pushed his hips into mine, and I felt a rigid bulge throbbing against my belly. Lips close to my ear, fingers trawling me up over his erection, "I could never have made love to you, Bella."

Nobly, Edward made not another move but to make it understood, "We'll do this however you want, Bella."

His confessions were both weighty and wanton. I undulated into his cock just for the pleasurable feel of something he'd never shown me before. I kissed his mouth closely, ran my tongue over the seam of his, pulled at his ears and tickled his sideburns.

Then I pushed him away.

_Was that it? My final kiss? This, our last goodbye?_

I shook my head and glared at him. Then let it all go, "I've been with men, Edward."

He scrunched his eyes tight closed. I felt rather than heard the feral rumble rutting in his chest. Every sinew clenched, before, one-by-one, he forcibly relaxed. Lastly he opened his eyes, hues of black-coal-dust, and I met his look and his stance because I wasn't going to apologize.

Dim shadows chased his tone, "I've never looked at another woman."

Momentarily, I curled over onto myself. I wanted to puke. _Oh god! _I was gutted by what I'd done. I was fucking pleased he'd remained chaste and true. Sucking arctic air down in great gulps, I stood up and owned my carnal trysts.

I felt like I was challenging him again.

Through barred teeth that could slice and dice any of the guys I'd fucked, with his face a handsome humanistic visage even fueled with the vitriolic jealousy he was trying to contain, Edward intoned, "I never imagined you'd wait for me."

_Really?_

He stooped over me, and I saw a glimpse of the nightmare creature sharing his spirit, "But I don't ever want to hear about it, Bella."

I was shaking. _Was I enraged? Grateful? Pissed off? Blameworthy? Flattered?_

All of the above.

He'd released me, _and_ bound me to him.

This fucking dance was almost beyond my abilities.

But if he was here, for me, once more, I'd meet him at every step.

Bitchily, I incised, "I don't need your absolution, you know."

The anger was gone. Not buried, but contained. The poison I'd seen gathering over his teeth and plucking up the capillaries in his gorgeous neck, shafting through his eyes, dissipated.

"You never did," he looked down and back at me, his lashes swags of obsidian velvet curtains opening just enough to highlight a twinkling midnight sky.

Now I needed to solace him.

"They never fucking touched me the way you do…_the way you did. _And I refuse to feel guilty for it." A torrent of acknowledgement wanted out as if I were seated in a dark wood closet, a grated screen between us, a dogcollar binding his muscular neck.

Fingering his collar, as if reading my mind, Edward took a step back to me, his hands open, surrendering, "_I need yours._ I need your remission of my sins."

I ached for him, for myself, for the love we hadn't fought hard enough to keep!

"You _always _had it, my love," I pushed my arm around his lithe hips, the landscape my hands had itched to wander over for so goddamn long.

Clutching my face, looking at me pridefully, he asked disbelievingly, "Always?" His brow furrowed, his lips curled in distaste with himself.

"Let your demons go, Edward. _Yes, always,_" I rubbed my thumb over the cherry brightness of his lower lip.

"And now?"

_Why hold onto this hateful thing, this breeding anger, this stewing grottiness? _

Untamed animals, my hands ran through his hair, that copper tarnished autumnal haze of mixed craziness. I mired myself to his form and kissed every inch I could find because not do so would just fucking kill me again, "Yes, _god yes, Edward!_ I forgive you!"

His eyes widened and his breath thunked and his mouth turned away from mine, "You still sing to me."

_To me._

Not _for me_.

The difference was startling. We wouldn't own each other.

We would possess each other willingly, _this time._

_Equally. _Should it be so.

With my face so sweetly enclosed in his grasp, Edward kissed me, finally. Here. Where I'd known he'd be. Deeply, passionately, so we both moaned loudly enough Jenks herded his brood, skates and all, to his giant gas-guzzling SUV.

Seating my ass in his hands for the very first time, Edward grumbled and fondled and fingered up to my lower back, looking for entrance to the rounds of flesh goading him on.

Conceding his control, guided by our instincts, Edward shed his maintained aloofness and let me _feel_ his body; his proud cock nestling right against my inner thigh as he dipped his knees and touched my breasts with his lean fingers almost eating through cloth to get to my bare skin.

I whimpered and clutched, dug in and doggedly kissed his pretty manly mouth until he pressed his tongue to mine and twirled that luscious muscle, wet and slick, around mine.

The tips of our tongues, the corners of our mouths, parted slowly. I sucked in the bow of his until he groaned and trod my hips further against him.

Dirty and desperate, I needed to know straight out, "You said you could never make love to me. What of now?"

"Christ, Bella! Can you feel me?" He shifted his penis so it sat right and true and strong between us. "You think I can stop this now?" He nibbled my earlobe and the depth of his melodious voice racked shockwaves through me, "_I may never stop once we start."_

"_Mmm, Jesus, yes."_ I made love to his lips with my tongue, thrusting in and out of his mouth while he drove his pelvis to mine. I arched my back and was close to begging him to fuck me right there in the middle of the Brown Creek Pond.

I grabbed Edward's ass and the feel of his buttocks straining to my hands was enough to make me break our kiss and laugh upright to the diamond bright, cloud-skittered sky!

I yanked his hair, because I didn't know how to handle him anymore, and I was beyond caring any trespassing of his rigidly preserved misguided restrictions. "You're so beautiful."

He sighed with his breath pelting harshly.

"I missed you."

His face pounded the dip of my shoulder.

"You're a mystery."

Edward groaned and sank his hands into me, more firmly, less in control. Frantic want growled between us, melting ice, scaring off families and late-night anglers.

"You. Left."

He nodded against me and started to turn his face away from its warm cradle of my flesh. Ownership of one more claim to blame was his.

_But did I really want that? How much culpability could one man take? Had he not injured himself enough?_

I was crumbling like a Christmas sugar cookie. My righteous anger tumbling down like a gingerbread house being devoured by young kids on Noel's Eve.

I wouldn't let him leave the nook of my neck. I held him hard by the back of his head, spilling his sundry locks between my fingers, searching for a reason not to love him as I always had, always would.

_I found none._

"I'm dying to be with you."

"Just tell me how you want it."

"The way I always did, Edward. All of you, or nothing."

"You can have me how ever you want me, Bella."

"Or not at all?" One last argument reared its ugly head. _I just needed him to fight for me as I'd fought down every tendency toward him, through autumn, winter, spring, and summer, thrice-fold._

Full-blown rays of greenstone buttressed the battlement of his eyes, phosphorescent, blistering, lit with a wanton intensity turning gold to emeralds, "You want me to leave? Now you've seen me, Bella, you think I'll just walk away? I'm staying until you believe me, or until you tell me to go."

_Sexy._ Stern. _This Edward wasn't going to roll over and play dead. _

I tore off my skates, holding to his forearm for balance.

Otherwise, he didn't aid me.

The silver knives clattered to ice, the white leather camouflaged by snow. Ice chips settled. Laces dangled and danced and limped to the pond's surface.

The bright crimson satin inside my figure skates looked like the wet cavern of a mouth seeking another.

Ripe with desire, full and juicy of color.

Our new boundaries were being set.

I was able.

I stood.

Edward enclosed me in a rugged hug, grasping my bottom, molding to my waist. Thrusting me back one pace at a time; I couldn't see where we were going or what obstacles lay behind my feet, but I trusted him to watch out for me..._again._

Competent, on my own. Trusting of his security. Standing on my own two feet yet allowing him to steer me, everything seesawed until we came to a balanced fulcrum.

_This_ would just have to work.

Icy flakes sucked at the knee socks Renee had made for me in one of her fits of 'homemaking'. The soles of my feet ticked with snow sucking into thistle colored cotton-wool.

I shivered.

He lifted me.

His power met mine. I suckled his neck, lips tongue mouth wet heat to chilled honey.

I'd been too young! Now I knew my foibles, I _was _older. On my way to becoming wiser.

This was the touch I'd felt on the horizon.

Saying goodbye to my anger, my venom-filled nasty wish to kick Edward in the nuts, but only if I could cause more damage to his balls than my own body in such an assault.

Beneath the poignant haunting, the recurring sadness, I was a new person. A woman more gifted with the fortitude to love completely, maturely.

We were each, finally, deserving of this unearthly intangible celestial love.

I held Edward tighter.

_How could I blame him, still? _

_I couldn't._

The poison, hate, blame, need for shelterand inability to act on my own;his wanting to safeguard in chivalrous intent, with his mores and gallantness, his idea he could save me from himself and others like him by absconding…all of that stupidity flooded away from both of us. Corroded, turned to stars burning out.

Diamonds, compacting. Forming.

_This was the moment._

All that remained was love. And three years of tamped down flames ignited!

My voice that had known vice was as rusty, unused, and unlocked as the decomposed hasp of someone or other's fishing shackwe broke through, because, though I'd said it before, this time I knew what it meant! There was no 'What if' or 'Who will save me'. There wasn't an Edward God and a Bella Mortal. This time, there was simply us, and knowing we would stand together, shoulder-to-shoulder, hand-in-hand, meeting the unknown with determination.

Now I loved him on the same grounds he did me. And I believed our love was the same.

With my heart seated like a lumpy, ultimately deserving morsel in my throat, I pushed past the last vestige of fear to announce, to _vow_, "I love you, Edward. _I love you now._"

He juggled me against splintery wood, holding me up with one thigh so he could touch my face and feel the rush of my words, my avowal. His fingers soldiered across my mouth, and I smiled to say it again, liberated, "I love you now, Edward!"

Smoothing his thumb over my lips, he hushed me mutely so he could parlay, "Bella, _Bella, _I think I've loved you forever."

Closing my eyes, I knew the truth.

His delicious, devilish, kiss pressed so my head knocked to the wall with a _thud._

"_Fucking hell!"_ I exclaimed against his trickery mouth as boards were thrown off their nailed planks, becoming more warped with each twirl of his hedonistic tongue.

_He'd never kissed me like this!_

I felt freed!

Placing me sideways on the rough hewn bench, shoving aside tossed-off hats and ear muffs, little orange flags and ice traps, Edward kneeled on the ground.

"You swear a lot." This was the first time I'd seen his smile, the thing I'd felt against my collar bone.

"Yes."

"_Hmmm,_" he hummed and began unclothing me. First my gloves, my vest he unsnapped so fucking slowly I started writhing, begging silently for more and more and more and faster. He unzipped my fleece and took my outerwear down my arms. Joining my hands at the wrist, above my head, Edward ran his hands first under my thermal shirt, testing, touching, teasing, watching with masted eyes the arch and dance of my breasts trying to make haste of his work.

Cold, durable, long. His fingers sent a thrum of longing straight from my pussy to my nipples and right back down my cleavage to my belly button.

Skimming the underside of my breasts, Edward sucked in a breath and bit his lips before he blew out a gusty breath, "No brassiere? _Shit_, Bella."

I laughed and raised my nipples up to his thumbs that were whispering air against me, "No _bra_, Edward. And when did you take up swearing?"

I swerved against his clutch and lathed his lips with the tip of my tongue so he could feel my heat and founder himself.

Coiling back, Edward joked, "We've both changed, love."

Opening my legs, I pressed as closely to his cock as I could, "Has this?"

"No, I just never let you see it."

I was shocked and turned on beyond fucking anything!

He took my silence to heart and continued his disrobement of me, finally pulling off my shirt. His hand was just under my ass, and he lifted me up to my knees on that damn raspy bench, bringing my bright camellia nipples, aroused to silky juts, to the level of his mouth.

Eyes wandering over my bared flesh, Edward heated me with the thick rolled erection in his jeans and the halogen flare of his meandering look.

Purchasing a pink niblet in his mouth, he licked with the full flat of his tongue. I came unglued! My hands still manacled, I beat them back to the timber, shaking the shack's surrounds, my body a bow. His mouth an arrow. His touch targeting my most sensitive points.

"FUCK!"

Quickly now, Edward pushed down my jeans, heavy socks, my panties, leaving me naked.

For the first time, I didn't want to cower.

He angled me lower, bearing up my back, reclining my head, making me a rainbow spilling all feelings turned to hues dappled by rain, raking me with his eyes and mouth and hands. Opening me, like clouds parting to azure skies.

The width of his palm spanned my tits, a pinkie and thumb to my nipples, rakishly pulling down, spreading an erogenous haze-filled heat from my curling toes, to my clenching-at-air fingertips, to my tautened tummy and my eager limbs. Every single bit of me took on the form of a sensual unleashed woman.

He twirled down through the fine curly ticking of my pubic hair, and looked for a complete minute. Just watching. Seeing. Memorizing. Whorls of padded fingertips parted my lips to find my clitoris. And when he touched it, softly, I came off the bench in a clutching rush of muscles beseeching like my breath, "_Oh YES!"_

His caresses were everything my body craved, because he'd always known me. Not coarse, though his voice rode like gravelly paths against my ear, "You like that?"

He didn't need to pinch or pull or tug. He pressed and timed and circled and licked; with that royal mouth that could devour, Edward strolled languidly. With fingers that could cleave a savage animal in two effortlessly, he prodded and rippled and lavished and brought me to climax with only one finger inside me, two listing up and down my nether lips, and his thumb flickering my clit.

I grabbed his forearms, his cheeks, bit his lips, tried to rip off his clothes, sank my hands to his hair and mine! Mindlessly beating my head back and forth, back and forth as he feathered in and out, _in and out._

My juices ran out.

My body collapsed.

We colluded in the trespassed cabin.

Shaded by wood, and lit by dimly glowing kindling dying out.

Connubial.

Concubine.

Concupiscent.

"Jesus, _love_, you're resplendent when you cum. I wish I'd seen that before."

I rolled my cheek to his hand, kissed the hills of his palm.

Lackadaisical, I couldn't even speak.

But I wanted him naked, right fucking now.

I sat up, lazily. My legs splayed to either side of his thighs as he stood to his tall height. Making me dizzy with his handsomeness, his physique, his unbelievable beauty I now believed to be mine.

While I worried through the big bakelite buttons of his navy coat, Edward picked up my tits, weighing their heft, admiring the imperfect pear shape, running his fingers over the peach-colored skin, fretting my nipples…breaking my concentration until I shook his hands off, and he jokingly held them at his back.

Next, his top. Focusing, I quickly undid the prestids. My hands flat to the chest I'd never been permitted to touch, I brushed first one side and then the other apart and gorged myself, my sight and my touch, on his pectorals, his stomach, his ribs, his belly button, and that fucking almighty sexy pleasure trail leading to the promised land.

I smiled and licked the nappy hair.

Edward growled and lost another foothold on his straight-laced presence.

I put my index and middle digits exactly where his had been earlier, inside the waistband of his jeans. I felt what I'd imagined. The sinewy striations of muscles slicing gorges into his body. Leading, unerringly, in a point, right down to his shaft.

I could see the lovely thick shape of him jostling inside his pants.

Braiding a length of my tresses in his hand and around his powerful wrist, Edward locked us together.

He pushed on my shoulder, leant down to suckle at my mouth.

But I wanted to look.

I popped open each copper button, grazing his inner thighs until his knees trembled, and he bore himself up against the planked timber so as not to topple to the ground.

_I had this power. Only me. Only him._

The inverted triangle of splayed fabric laid apart. Beneath, he was bare. Awed, I looked up and felt the deep cavernous brown of my gaze mesh with the strobing carnivorous spread of his own.

A half smile was born on his mouth, in encouragement and passion.

_He wanted me to look further._

With two fingers, I pushed down the denim. My free hand reached inside, down to the juncture of jean and cock and balls. I sagged and fingered the most silken filled orbs of his sac. Bursting, like kumquats, I gently massaged those velvety globes until he groaned and tightened around my hair, toppled above me with his forearm propped against the wall, beating it, his biceps blanched with huge deep blue veins filled with toxin.

"More?" I asked, a coquette.

"_Please,"_ he answered, beholden.

Filtering my touch inside the placket, I pushed aside indigo and found the glowing cold steel rod of his cock. It sat, pulsing, sped over by juts of arteries, the largest running up the underside, from root to canopy. A giant dowel. At the top? A mushrooming head of fucking pure sexy. Turning bluish-purple, he was so hard. Cum and toxin pearled atop the slim bright tiny lips centering his head. Crepe de chine in flesh's hottest tones tipped up to the creamiest rim surrounding him.

_In. My. Mouth._

I think he heard my thoughts then.

I felt my foreign flush fly up to my chest and lift my tits, litter my face with rosiness.

For a second, Edward forgot what I was doing, "You still blush."

I adjusted him out of his pants, panted two hot breaths round his dick and loved his quivering abdomen, "Only for you."

I slipped him inside, widening my mouth, lipping his lovely little hidden mouth and sweeping dollops of shivering cum into me.

He never said, '_You can't' _or _'Please don't'_.

Edward let me lick and love and lavish his cock, a long light-filled shaft, with lengthy laps and deep hard sucks. Until his entire body twitched, shoved, plastered with lust, and he pulled himself out, slowly so I could savor the sharp tang and sweet sexy scent of his stiff heathenish deliciousness on the way out my mouth. Holding close, he ran his erection from corner to corner of my lips, marking my pleasured smile with his cock.

Up and up and up, above me, Edward quavered in the ember's limpid red glow manifesting throughout this five-by-five cabin. The chinks in the planks let in shutters of heaven's spill.

My palm to the big bright head of his cock, I kept hold as he knelt. I shuddered.

Voice hungry and loving and clipped with wanting me now, "Cold, love?"

I sucked in a breath and saw Edward watching my breasts shudder, my nipples peak again, my hands digging up from his tum to his throat, "Fuck yes!"

He laughed.

It was so beautiful, that sound of angels among demons, a man inside the beast.

Hugging him so my breasts belted his chest, I missed this being, "You were always more playful than you gave yourself credit for."

Rotating from me, triggered by my thoughts, Edward stoked the fire. His back turned, he looked over his shoulder, "Only you, Bella. You made me young, _mortal_."

He twisted newspaper, made a new ziggurat of kindling, blew until a fresh flame took root.

Fire upon ice.

His ass claimed me. His back moved sinuously with each manly deviation from the monster. His thighs rippled with muscle and hair.

_Edward was no longer a boy._

I sucked in a breath.

He heard me.

Pivoting on his heels, naked and with his thighs spread so I could clearly see the strong emblem of his dick a bastion beating against his navel, taut muscles everywhere hardening into rigidity, alluding to the fucking to come, Edward's voice spoke of sex, "How can I warm you, babe?"

I stood.

His teasing look dissolved.

He rose.

He knew.

His body might be frigid, but the feelings he engendered stoked a fucking full scorching screaming fire inside and over me!

I licked his lips, tucked my hands from his chest to his stomach whose muscles linked harder with each stroked, up to his armpits where I grazed over the susceptible concavity.

"Oh, _you know_, Edward."

From head to toe, less than a yard between us, bared for once and all, we watched and wondered and drank the vision before us.

_How could a chin be pouty? Straight nose, the most sensual eyebrows, lips beautifully alizarin, handsomely full…his throat, the cord of muscle and tendon that moved beneath my tongue, his Adam's Apple that I nipped…his shoulders…his hands that knew so much of my history were beginning to search out my present, to cast our future…_

Splendid and now! Barbaric and angelic, we crashed! We surrendered to each other.

Hush, plush, lust, now.

Potash**, **potage**, **potent.

He pushed me back, I moved forward.

We ended up on that slim creaking plinth. My back placketed in his arms. My head pounded. Edward sank in. There was no waiting, no teasing, no placating because we belonged to each other.

Slowly, filled. Feeling. Fully. Finally.

Fire.

Ice.

Melting.

_Home._

He barely moved. His cold, my heat.

We didn't talk.

Unhurried.

His hardness stole away my breath. My soft hot wet clasp caused his cheeks to claw inside-out.

I bent back.

He folded forward.

His motion felt like seconds. It made us into a lifetime.

My hips didn't still.

My cunt sloughed him up and down.

_In our time._

_For the first time._

Ruddy, chapped, rouged, ruched, ready, reddened.

Wet, wicked, pink, pulsing.

Never did we change rhythm.

Because this was _home._

Languorous filling, fantastic flying out. Tenderly in. Excruciatingly out!

Our mouths met, but we couldn't kiss beyond emotion.

The subtlest difference, my leg hiked just a bit higher and our bodies clapped.

Skin slapped.

We locked, legs, arms, hips, cock, lips, pussy, wet, cold, hot, slick, sweat, sex.

Air locked.

Time stopped.

Groping and holding and starving and staving and caving in and, "_Oh my fucking GOD!"_

_Nothing fucking moved._

Not monsters, buried.

Not lovers, linked**.**

Not hearts, twinned.

Not mouths, breathing so fucking hard.

I scratched, coming down.

He bruised me, slightly, finding earth.

A burst of flame lifted a piece of pine and settled the pyre back down to ash.

Now we could kiss.

Now we embraced.

_Now._

"_I love you, now."_

"_I've loved you always."_

"_I did wait."_

"_I never strayed."_

"_I hoped."_

"_I hoped."_

"What if I choose to remain mortal?"

"Then I'll love you _so long as you live, till death do us part."_

"And then?" I wrapped a navy blue fleecy blanket about us, found my nesting place against his chest, inside his shoulder, my legs pushing up his thighs, waiting for, _wanting, _more.

_Always more._

"_And then?_ I'll follow you, _my love._"

* * *

~Hi. That's me. The romantic with an edge. Tell me if I hit you hard and brought it all home ~

Shimmer Awards voting has started! I've got three or four bits up, so make haste. Link is on my profile.

Up next? The end of _Looking Glass_, more _Dead Confederates, Carnal Knowledge 101, _and _Fairytale_ (this will be the Plea series from my _Men of Twilight _challenge) starting with a new chapter.

_Xoxo_

_Rie~_


	2. Endure

Gotta' give my love to **Viola Cornuta**! She simply owns me.

Also to **winterstale**, for hand-holding (go read her _Homecoming_) hard and tight. Of course I'd never neglect my Dead Confed Double Wide ladies! Kisses all over, thanks for putting up with me J.

**Disclaimer: **Characters, setting, whatever…not mine.

Cheers **eviekinz **and **Vi** for schooling me on how to fake out fanfuck fail! Let's see if this works.

This is set prior to chapter one and a little bit after.

If you can, please watch this video, before or after. _What Sarah Said, _Death Cab for Cutie. The song and the images inside the vid, the tone and lament and pain, the entire thing is everything: www(DOT)youtube(DOT)com/watch?v=I483tB12SyE

~~Well, this is possibly one of the shortest things I never intended to write. Read on~~

* * *

**Endure**

I clutched my ribs, as if my hands could withhold the spilling of my insides.

Stop my intestines from flopping like dead eels, my heart from pounding into slowness then racing in fury.

My fingers dug to the dents and bruised, just the way he'd always worried he would.

Bruises, that's what I wanted.

Marks.

His marks on my flesh.

He'd left and taken every fucking thing with him. Turning me into the inhuman bestial creature he never wanted me to be.

Gasping through terror that lashed me with the ghastliness of this complete vacuum, tears no longer wet my face.

Not two days later.

Not three.

Not a month.

The keening I heard was a shriek of fingernails scratching on glass. The affliction splitting me open, despite the tight hold of my hands, was unstoppable.

"AHHHHHH!"

I pounded the mattress and yanked at my lank matted hair!

There was nothing.

A void.

Not a touch, a kiss. Not a photo. No, because he'd stolen them right along with my heart, that thing that flew about my chest in his purloined presence.

My body shook with the tremendous realization my mind couldn't comprehend… Edward had left me.

I hadn't been able to watch his retreating back; I didn't want to see his proud bearing in goodbye. Instead I focused, hysterically, on his shoes. Shiny as his flaming hair, but black as his heart. Those feet moved not with the manly grace I'd always admired. Lumbering in gait.

Pulling up his feet as if stuck in a mire.

One step, two steps. _Halt._ Half-turn to turn my soul inside-out. Pivot back. Straight ahead. Three steps and four more.

Sluggishly, even, like my own blood cooling inside, slowing right down to a _clump-clomp-clump._

And then hastening while I'd collapsed.

My cheek had hit the sodden forest floor the same time I'd heard the final infinite _crunch_ of shoe leather on a solitary crisp leaf.

The bed frame shook as it never had, and now never would, with Edward's love making.

I beat the rocking chair in the corner with a baseball bat Jacob had left in my truckbed, in case of leeches getting too handsy.

_Bedlam._

Splinters shattered air and timber tucking into warped patterns pelted the surrounds with a satisfying _crush_.

A crush?

Is that all he though this had been?

Underneath the cavernous craving and executing ending of his abandoning me, I felt a chill settle over me, much icier than his touch had ever been.

"Bastard!" I ranted to thin air. I tore up my duvet with pinking shears stolen from Renee's basket of miscellaneous projects and gewgaws. I cranked up floorboards, I tore off wallpaper in all its twee chintz pattern.

I raped my brush through my hair and sniffed at the heated perfume he'd always seemed to love.

After I'd smashed all my keepsakes to little tiny shards, like my love, after I'd ripped the sheets off my bed and sliced them up into particles that could never be put back together, letting his scent swift to the breeze, when I'd wildly destroyed my books and thrown away everything I'd owned and known, _with him,_ then I went downstairs.

Doctors had been consulted, during my _interlude._

Was there a cure for the lovelorn?

Apparently not.

Doctor Goddamn Cullen.

Yeah, a hardness was setting in.

I held forcefully round my middle and adopted a new face.

This mask, like a marionette yet my strings were no longer pulled by another, gaped and tried to intone and nod and agree at all the right places.

Avoid.

Feint and fall back.

I needed a cane to uphold my lagging body.

It was amazing what force and strength the utter absence of a heart could generate.

Now I knew how Edward felt.

I was impervious.

No one could touch me.

The solitude was wondrous.

It was hallucinatory.

And revealing.

All the ways Jessica insulted me. All the sickening scenarios Mike formulated about me. Well, at least Lauren remained true to form, just as bitchy as she'd always been.

Jakeand his boys capered and cajoled; I didn't need backup dancers or a Greek chorus.

Even more like _him._ I never fucking slept. Because the traitor left me in my dreams as well as in real life.

What happened to happily ever after?

Cinderella to cinders and coal dust.

Jaded, jaundiced, _jilted._

Puke.

I pushed away as much bile as I could. Swallowed acid entrails. Until they ate tracks into my throat with every gulp.

How could I eat.

Everything sat in my mouth like dirt.

Just like _he_ had taken that foul bite of pizza.

_Soil._

I should've known.

First his car.

Gone.

Gapping.

He drove my truck without complaint.

Not even a muttered insult at the rattling engine.

His car went away, and his smile.

Ominous, portentous and I naively believed he would never go. _Unless it was for my own good._

My body begged for his mouth and his hands.

_He never said goodbye._

Not really.

He just… left me. With lies I believed more fully than the truth.

First he stole away the pluck of his lips.

Then he took his whispers from against my ear and throat.

I watched him swallow some other need.

Terse and stern, Edward's jaw became taut over three nights.

_I'd known_.

Can't have you; want you, in all the worst ways. Danger and love, wars and rage and blood.

_Surely I'd known._

The bow of his lips turned down with every passing day.

Muted and desperate was his passion.

He never caressed me unless I asked.

_I shouldn't have had to plead._

I wrapped a shroud of unfulfilled longing about myself.

Four days.

_I'd known what he was telling me with his turning away._

Wound into a coil, I sprang at him! "Kiss me, Edward," I beseeched for the thing that should've been mine to take!

And he did, and it was untempered. And followed by a grunt and apology for the hardness of his seduction he finally let show.

Inside, I screamed, "_Don't go!"_

Wretchedly, he did.

Little pieces of me flaked away like dust from a sand castle.

The flag drooped, the moat was trespassed.

Romance was discarded.

I was left in my shell.

It was hard.

It was, simply, fucking Hell.

Eventually I danced among the pagans.

A new me, _Bella revisited_, remade.

I wasn't turned, but I _was_ rolled, my spleen showing.

Yes, just like one of Charlie's trout wrestling to oust the hook in its gills.

An orphan urchin amphibian floundering and finding sure legs on land.

An urchin.

Star crossed lovers and all that happy horseshit. I'd never look at _Romeo and Juliet_ the same way again.

Would I have died for him, a Capulet to his Montague?

I would have.

Now, not so much.

Alone and stalwart.

On my own.

I did unmentionable things while I was curing. And the healing made my scarring a thing like Jasper's, only visible underneath my eaten tissue.

As if I were six feet under already.

Each molecule of him he never wanted me to understand, with his necrotic desires…I felt it all now!

Pining.

Pine box.

A rotten false fruit, decayed to the core. _"Everything about me is designed to lure you in." _

Mealy.

Meaningless.

Like the fucking poison apple, so fleshy and glossy and pink and pretty on the outside, Snow White's witchy queen motherfucking – _I laughed at the feel of curses falling off my tongue with no Edward, timely timeless Edward, to take offense _-- stepmother had fed her fostered offspring. I hid the worms deep down inside, after a time. Boy did I ever!

Inside me.

Men… they were too hot…but I got off nonetheless. I blamed it on all my chained desires, my ingrained derision at my own impulses due to Edward's scant and far too chaste embraces.

When I came, I'd feel a cold prickling in the base of my spine, as if _his_ hand was splayed there, lifting me up and into him, and over him, and onto that frigid Pantheon form!

Coming down, breathing hard and ragged, I'd lock my hands away, with my heart. Turn my head aside, wanting nothing more than that orgasm. Shoving the nameless bedfellows away, I'd sit at the edges of beds, feel along the floor with the tips of my toes for my panties.

A warm caress against my rounded back would reheat my ire.

Tears dropped no more.

I'd tear on my clothes.

I'd remember Miss Manners, "Thank you." I'd murmur. Looking back just once. To those nothing men. I appreciated their giving, their not needing, the fact they'd never leave me because I went away first.

Thirsty, I'd stop in their kitchens, dinettes, at their dorm-room mini-fridges for a glass or bottle of water.

The slick cool ran down my throat like _his _icy release should have.

_Not them._

I'd remember.

I'd hate.

I'd slam the tumbler to the counter, smash the door against the frame as I left.

But even that drink didn't replenish the tears long forgotten from my eyes.

_Another part of me, just like him._

No more. No longer the wastrel waiting waif, to be pitied. I was _wanted_, I was _fearsome_.

My rage had only one outlet, and that was sex.

I liked that my knees knocked and were wobbly with cumming so many times in such a short space.

The best part was I was home right at dinnertime.

I planned a gap-year after graduation. Why not? All the rich fuckers were doing it, I could too. Only I didn't go abroad… I didn't fucking go anywhere. A year turned to two and then three while I worked half-assed at a piss-ant job, living at home and squirreling away my earnings just so I knew, someday, I could go _somewhere_. When this hellhole released me.

The strain inside my skin was visible on my face, a stony thing…another gift he'd given me in parting, so I looked more and more like him. Pallid, bruised under my eyes, lacking in humanity. I could just as easily murder my so-called friends.

Flush, blush, flustering… gone.

Everything was over.

_Everything was over._

More than black, all was blank.

I had become a zombie.

_Selfish fucking bastard!_

Leaving each bed, my jeans rasped my thighs, and I felt every thread and cold gust of wind much more than my memories of _him_.

Desiccated. Bitten but not. Never immortal but dying. And left.

I kissed my innocence goodbye with his devastating walk. And walked as well.

I burned my books. I could no longer crack them open. Not without remembering _his_ hands running across the pages as he recited passages to me.

_No._

I gathered new looks.

I didn't ignore_ them._

Charlie watched wearily with his cop's eyes but never said a word, so thankful was he I was alive, breathing, not totally fucking comatose or screaming out nightmares every night.

Renee accompanied me to the gynie, and passed off the pill as every young woman's right of passage.

And made sure I was supplied with rubbers of various shapes, sizes, and textures.

Bless her.

It was amazing to me how much I could get away with between the hours of 3:30 and 10:00, while I was finishing out high school. And all that time lost, _with Edward._ So fucking needlessly chivalrous! Squiring me about, having me home before curfew, sliding into my bed, night after night, _yes!_, but never touching more than the briefest slice of my tummy, my shoulders. Limiting himself to my face and neck and hair.

I'd never felt his palms slipping over my calves, pushing my thighs open, sneaking into my panties, cupping my tit and pressing at my nipple. _Never._

Wasted. So many wasted nights!

_Drip-drip-drip._

_Goodbye my love._

_~~ll~~_

Now?

Now he was here.

Three years, three months.

In the ice shack. Edward had shackled my hands above my head and fucked

himself back into my life.

The spite and bile had leaked out of me.

I was shivering with his seed deep-seated inside of me.

He knew he wasn't my first, not by a fucking longshot. And I'd nearly laughed at the devastation eroding his face from eyes to mouth. _He'd deserved it._

I cried with his love.

_He deserved me._

Afterward I couldn't control the sobs splintering me. This man, this immortal being never needed anyone before me. And he'd come back, almost too late. But he'd come back.

Even more handsome, much more manly, so much stronger, and haggard, and rugged. The waxiness of his cheeks sitting too high and stretched over metal bone. The laxness around his eyes. The limp of his hair. The tight hold of his hands that wouldn't let me go.

He'd aged as I had. In our being apart, Edward became a man. My man.

Just as I was fully a woman, only to his body, heart, stroking and love-making.

_Only his, always his._

I wanted to deny it again and kick him! I slapped his face as soon as my senses were regained from the crippling orgasm that tore me against the makeshift bench I laid upon like a pyre.

With all my might!

Anger rehatched.

"Why, why, why?" I pounded and punched and fucking hated I'd never ever scar him, not by his flesh… maybe by his soul.

Naked and goddamn glorious, he egressed my body. Oh, he was slow in leaving the tight wet depths of me. So languid, I clenched against him again and immediately wanted him back.

The wealth of his cock was a standard in this cold air. Enormously hard, still, again, _whatever,_ wet with me and him. Still pushing out pearls of sex from his beautifully taut purple head. Seated beside me, my legs open with dimes of cum sifting right down my thighs, Edward's staff stood tall and I couldn't take my eyes off it.

I scooched back to the wall. I couldn't even close my legs because I wanted him in me again beyond anything.

_Almost._

Without thought, a move he'd never have done in my presence before, Edward gripped his cock and lined it up and down in his hand.

My head met un-sanded wood and shavings shook into my hair, but I watched this untamed vampire stroking himself.

_Good god! He was beyond beautiful!_

I couldn't help myself. When he looked at me from his furbelow lashes, all lusty gold and engorged. I crawled across the bench and straddled his thighs. Slowly. Rolling my body upon his straight striated shaft, rocking my head from side to side with each push, tucking the soles of my feet beneath his knees. I saw his abdomen clench hard, his nipples pucker, the muscles along his chest, arms, and neck bunch with each sexy gyration upon him.

His hands, those long-fingered masterpieces, sank into my ass and assayed a new rhythm; hard hot faster!

I kissed his mouth. Licked his lips, and touched his teeth. I pressed my finger to his tongue, and three to his balls, sitting back to watch myself rise upon him, "Slowly, lover."

I decreed.

I owned this.

Smooth and hot. I begged him not to move. This was mine, all me. I'd earned this.

A hand to his chest, I fingered up a nipple to a dusky brown nub and then sucked on his other, resplendently on fire with the tightening of all his otherworldly muscles beneath me. The biggest of all inside me.

Sitting up, I smiled down at him. My man. My lover, my mate.

Scratching his thighs, I played with the thickening whorl of hair until I rained closer to his cock, his sac, my plump folds falling torturously slowly over him.

Deep tracks of wet skeined our bodies, And I bit him hard! His shoulder, his nipple, his armpit raised up! I sneaked over his mouth open in shock and then nipped his lips with my teeth, wishing I could draw blood out. I pled down so hard and heard his gasp, and I growled, "I thought I'd never fucking see you again!"

Wild and savage, I rode Edward, and he watched with a wantonness spreading his lips into a wide howl, taking my ass in hand and gripping me just as roughly to him so we slapped discordantly.

I grabbed his hair and jerked his head back. He stood with me still all over him, grinding my pelvis to his, the suction of his balls plastered to my behind.

"You want this?" he grunted between hellacious thrusts, the rusty nails holding this shanty together clattering to ice.

I cried into his craned neck, "Yes! You fucking know I do!"

He stooped low and stopped all motion, slid his fingers into _us_ and came up with a hand glistening. Softly moving with each step to the far wall, a tremble in his arms and on his lips and in his eyes, washing wet fingers between our mouths and kissing up the labored breaths and succulent sweetness, "You want this, love?"

Crying, sobbing, keening and back to the place he'd abandoned me, I gained him inside my body and under my hands running all over him like the tears _finally_ fucking falling from my eyes! Everything, every part of him, everything now! I wanted him, frantically… never to be. Never to go. Always to remain!

My punishment turned to love. His detention became espousal. And even though my backside was jerking up against a coarse wall, his plunges weren't violent.

My love held me.

Upright.

Brutally, I sat over his magnificent cock. Beautifully, he held me up, watching me work it out with a craving sloughing humanity inside him.

It was too much to bear!

In the end I was beating his back, cumming, crippled, my ankles turned in against his ass, and he held me solid while he thrust inside me.

We were wet. With tears and sex. And cold, but this spark had been ignited, again.

"I don't care, Bella. I don't care. Anything you want." Edward ran his hands over my body with a trail of upright peaks, on fire, not cold.

We dressed.

I watched him pull on his clothes, something I'd never seen.

I wanted to take them off him again.

The nudeness of my desire was apparent.

"Later, baby," Edward pushed my jeans and tops back on me.

He held me.

_He held me._

He was the only man I'd ever allow to protect me.

In his truck, so unlike the sleek Volvo of days gone-by, Edward drove past my road.

"Where are we going?"

"Home."

And I was grateful _home_ wasn't the Cullen manse I'd known but a simple cottage on the outskirts of town, far enough away from the place where old memories still haunted, still hurt.

He made love to me.

In _our_ home.

In _our _bed. With the words, "You deserved so much more. You should never have had to beg me to touch, and kiss, and love you like this."

I slipped on top of him, my bare breasts squashing against his chest, our legs braided, I held his chin, my thumb in the cleft of it, "I know. And now?"

Full fat kisses wet our mouths, "And now we live."

_Or maybe, I would die, for him, for us._

_

* * *

  
_

~There might be more, there might not. Let me know what you think. I'm not being coy here~

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming of _Dead Confederates_ and _Youth Without Age._

Ta,

Rie~


	3. End

Thanks the keeper of my heart and soul and secrets, Viola Cornuta, for just being brilliant, and of course beta'ing.

An enormous hug to AngryBadgerGirl for her read of this and some well-aimed advice. A kiss to winterstale for being just what I need.

Disclaimer: Not mine, just sort of.

I don't know if anyone was waiting for this or not, but here you go. Truthfully, after the last chapter I was never certain there'd be another. But there is. And it's Edward.

~~For my Mer~~

* * *

**End**

**Edward**

_the blossoms shake_

_sudden water_

_down my sleeve,_

_sudden water_

_cool and clean_

_as snow—_

_as the stem-sharp_

_swords_

_go in_

_against your breast_

_and the sweet wild _

_rocks_

_leap over_

_and_

_lock us in._

_I TASTE THE ASHES OF YOUR DEATH_

_~Charles Bukowski_

_**Evermore**_

"Just fucking do it already, Edward." She still cursed like a sailor, drank like a lush, smoked a bit more than was necessary.

The tangle of wine with cigarette on her tongue, rubbing against mine, was headier than any blood I'd ever drink.

It was autumn now, nearly a full year since I'd returned; a festering fall that had been preceded by idylls and idling, languishing and loving, seasons of blame and betrayal and bliss.

I stopped pacing and folded my hand down my face, revealing eyes I was sure were half afflicted, half gleaming with excitement, "While I appreciate your enthusiasm, that's not really the reaction I was looking for." Wearily I crossed my arms over my bare chest, and watched Bella follow that simplest motion with recognizable carnality.

Swaying towards me with her skirt, her favored garb, accentuating her hips and whispering between her thighs so my hands clenched to grab the alluring fabric and push it up to her hips so I could see and lick the lovely, feathered pleasure between her legs, she pursed her lips to my throat and breathed, "While I _appreciate_ your candor, baby," she paused and looked up at me with a breathtaking combination of ingénue and spirited courtesan, "_just fucking do it._"

"Do what?" I asked, skimming my fingertips in between her breasts to her sides. "This?" with no warning I skirmished into her ribs and belly with the lightest tickling touch, not letting up, laughing loudly as she flailed in giggles and tried to smack my hands away.

Abruptly, her amusement eroded. I stopped. Bella grabbed my face, rained over it like a summer wash of love I watched exploding in crimson, gold, and azure--banners of bright emotion. Her lips suckled my chin and jaw and then my mouth--gliding, pressing—until our foreheads met and all that was left was hushed and no longer hasty and nevermore, and _never more_. Peeking between her lips, her tongue spoke against mine, between our mouths, backwards, forwards, fighting, giving mercy, giving in, "This really isn't a laughing matter, is it?"

Grunting with terror and tension and wanting, I swept her into a deep, wet kiss. We stopped, tore apart, still connected by gasps and fingers and body and soul, "There's never really been much to laugh about between us, my love."

_My lover._

_My woman, my mate._

I still wondered if she didn't hate me. Although sometimes she certainly did.

"Not so much. Not recently," Bella agreed when, before, she would have denied the truth. Did I wish for that same girl I'd known whose untarnished spirit had sprinted right into my body, tripping up my existence, startling me from a coma into cold-hot love?

There was beauty in the truth. There was brutality in reality. There was love mixed with disgust, with hurt… with friendship too.

I had fond memories of that girl. But I was going to make the most everlasting remembrances with this woman--this _Bella_ right here. Because now she was the person she was meant to be.

Brushing my knuckles over her cheek, I closed my eyes to Bella padding over the unfed bruises beneath my eyes. Both our flesh trembled with the force to combine in such a way we would never be sundered.

Sundry emotions colluded until the atmosphere was balmy and hectic with every spilling, organ-splitting impulse.

Boiled and churned and mixed together, this would just have to do. This would just have to be us.

Tilting my head, I nuzzled her ear until she shivered. Into that softest shell of skin I wondered, "Perhaps we can change that too."

Perking up, shifting gamine-like from heartbroken and wistful to impish and arch, Bella grinned, "I can _change_."

I plucked her lips up into a smiling kiss and a laugh rumbled between us, "Yes, lover, I'm sure you can."

"Now?" Wide and guileless, old and sage, Bella sank against me and began unbuttoning her blouse. First between her tits down to her waist. Wiggling her shoulders, the slip of satin wafted to the floor. In offering, she disrobed.

Touching every bared hill and peak and indentation and whorl and swirl and pink and cream and freckle and mole and wetness and pebbled and swollen and open and… _offering, _I took.

Swallowing hard, I lapped, readied, prepared her flesh to take mine in another manner, "I don't want you to die in pain, Bella."

My eyes tight and narrow, the harrowing push to have her _always_ almost buckled me. The _need_ to never fucking ever hurt her almost caused me to fall over and fly away one more inglorious time.

She grappled with my hands, placed them on her beautiful teardrop breasts, unbuckled my jeans and became a woman, a warrior, "Then don't let me die, baby. _And make me feel pleasure._"

I took.

I gave.

_**Never**_

There was no meadow, no going back to lost innocence in a wavy field of clover and delphiniums and fern and goldenrod.

We'd had that.

I'd quashed _that_ when I left.

No wildflowers.

But there was wild emotion flaying, whipping, stampeding, _ripping, shredding._

There was a smoky, black, underwater octopus-like ink stain on our lives, on our being together.

The tentacles that wrapped us tight stung, and bit, and bled.

Sometimes there was a spill of purest love, lightheadedness, peace, and being, blotting out the blight of our equal guilt.

This mismatched repair of us was sensual; sometimes savage, sometimes soft. Often, the only way we came together was puzzling, questioning, jagged.

Cutting, smarting, cunning.

Lethal, loving, fucking needing.

Green and gluttonous and hoping to solace, the punch of pain fisted through us almost too many times.

Astride me, Bella swiveled slowly, menacingly, over my cock. A strangled groan rent the silence of muted moans; she was crumbling, cussing, overflowing, "You're such an idiot, Edward," she panted.

Beating my torso, she sat down hard on me. I saw our damp hair blazing together as she used her thighs to slide back and forth on my dick, rubbing her clitoris into the base of my cock. Angered, aggravated, aggrieved, her rhythm was stilted as she stuttered through insults, "Why did you ruin us? What fucking madman's vengeance made you come back?" Bowing over me, jeering and teasing me with her nipples so damn close to my mouth, she looked like a wrathful succubus up through the damask dark curtain of her hair, "_I gave myself away."_

Tears sprung and rivered down her cheeks mixing with her sweat, making her hair cling to her flushed face.

I wanted to comfort her, but I was so fucking sick of this… _she gave herself away to other men._ I shuddered and clamped her ass, clenched my jaw, "Don't talk about them."

I lapped her nipple, the pink little candy-piece engorged and puffy and goading me.

Pulling the elongated cherry from my mouth, Bella braced herself backwards, her hands scrabbling up my thighs, an inhumanly gorgeous scorned woman, fucking me. To the ceiling she razed, "Don't talk about them? Are you fucking kidding me?" Forward, slithering, silken, lovely, lonely, livid, she pillowed my chest with her tits and grabbed great hunks of my hair, glaring at me and still winding her hips around me, over me, onto me until I was severely stamping down every tightening urge to cum. "What about you, what the hell were you up to for three cocksucking years after you left me, huh?"

The course of her hand gathered between us, circling, tempting, ringing my dick as we battled over and under and inside. With a jerk of my hips I almost bucked her off me, my shaft compacted by her tensed channel so much so my face was caving, my voice rubbley, "Well, I certainly wasn't sucking cock, _my love._"

I rolled her over, because I understood the onslaught to come.

My arms a cage of muscles straining, my legs rippling and shaking between hers, my chest pinning her down, I let her pound me with the wispy scatter of her pummeling blows. Spitting, hissing, sinking, gliding, fucking, loving, hating, "You _asshole_!" Bella's face cracked like the over-glazed, soup-bowl large, ceramic mug she drank her morning coffee from.

"You want to fuck, love, or do you want to fight? I'm pretty good at multitasking, but I'm fucking tired of you hitting me," I cuffed her wrists, kissed her mouth sloppily, lopsidedly meandered down her neck and stopped above her buttoned blousy breast.

The breath beat out of her.

Adjusting my hips, I pushed my cock fully up into her, blinking through fear and loathing, to see Bella below me.

Her cheeks bellowed in and out, every breath expanding her tits so they swabbed against me.

And every inhalation was exultation.

Every quiet exhalation was our apology, _this time._

Apogee, apostolic, lick. I dragged over her, into her, and harder and softer and held her hands and felt her heels in my ass, and we coupled, we conjoined, we surrendered, we damaged; I pounded, she met me, she whined out as I winched in, and mouths gaped and faces and eyes and words that saturated never were uttered because we, we… _we _embraced and staved off and gave in and gave off and fucked off and didn't give a toss and gave everything…and…_blue, red, gold… gone, shattered… sheared off, stopped. Stopped._

A blanket to warm.

A heartbeat…to warn.

A halfhearted smack and feminine growl, "Imbecile," against my Adam's apple.

Lax, never lackluster, always shimmering, Bella joined to me. _Flesh, flesh, flesh, heart… pumping._

A lump formed in my throat. I took her bottom and shunted her further up onto me as I smiled into her snarled hair where the mattress had snagged it, "Stupid woman." Tiredly, Bella massaged her kiss-awakened lips to mine. I turned my head to deepen, leant back on the pillow to lessen. When I spoke, my words made curlicues on her skin, moist wicks, the tick of my stomach and groin and chest lifting with speech, need, bleeding, "I've _always_ loved you, Bella."

She sighed, "I know." She thawed against me, "I love you too." She snuffled to sleep with the words hanging between us, _"What if that's not enough?"_

_Piece us back together again._

_Piecemeal._

_Bits and pieces._

Bite.

_**Again, and again**_

It was never easy.

Us, we, always? This shit was impossibly hard. Difficult, different.

I deserved it.

I'd left.

Defy.

Deny.

Own.

Grow.

Bud and bless and bloom and…

_Bleed._

_**Almost every time**_

"Now we live,"I'd said.

_Or maybe I would die for you, for us… _she'd confessed her idea.

A cottage in the foresty fen, secluded in the deep ivy-creeping woods where splendid light dappled in between shadow, in between leaf.

Inside. Outside.

Light. Day.

Owe. Pay.

_Squandered._

Domesticated.

She tended a flower bed and planted tomatoes when the weather warmed. And gigantic bloom-heavy sunflowers.

I mowed the lawn.

I ripped the cord right of out first lawnmower.

Bella didn't think McClanahan Hardware would give me a refund or exchange it.

It'd been my lucky day; a young lady was working the customer service desk.

I got my money back while Bella stomped off to scowl at the light fixtures.

I heard all about it as soon as we got home, on the moldy porch, slouching down on those warped boards, sloping into each other and repeating, _"I love only you."_

Ruffling orgasms.

Rife ire.

The simplest chores were tainted by numerous memories and ideas of what could have been… then.

I devoured a family of deer. Bella made a simple meal for herself. We sat together at the table. Sometimes holding hands, sometimes angered for no other reason than this… this was our life, _now._

This was my life.

When I walked into our house, I became a man, at least my body's appeal made it seem so.

Indestructible but for Bella's virulent expressions, indescribably hard, etched from human to immortal, I felt more mature than I ever had.

This time, she was washing the windows, grumbling.

As she reached up to the top sill, wiping away the hills of silt, her skirt made to her upper thighs.

Swatting a fly away, Bella inadvertently lifted the pink confection higher until I could see she wasn't wearing panties.

It was a hot Indian summer afternoon.

A tall fan oscillated over the kitchen, causing her unbound nipples to swell and purse.

Those two mounds were also unclothed beneath the barest white tank top.

Flapping up her skirts with the breeze of my movement, I sank two fingers inside her, allowing, "We could get a maid, you know."

Though she bit her lip and pushed onto my hand so I had to make a seat for her with my palms, Bella replied, "This is _my house."_

I pulled out, shaking my hand, sucking my fingertips, glowering at her, simply wanting her, "It's my house, too."

"Yeah?" she snapped the dirty cloth aside.

"Yeah," I started unbuttoning my jeans.

"That right?" Bella was already naked and sitting on a chair, her legs spread, her peach and pomegranate lips visible, her toes arched.

Shoving my pants off, I ripped through my t-shirt and craned my neck back when her tongue wrangled down that trail of hair leading from my belly button to my shaft.

"My. House." With a simple blow, I cracked the splat off her seat and bent her backwards.

"_Our house."_

I deserved her, if she'd have me.

Then, in the kitchen with her kettle whistling and Windex spattering in bright blue dribbles down the window, I came from between her legs with my cheeks slick and took her up to me with my cock… hard.

The fucking legs broke off her chair by the time I was through, and we'd dented the baseboard.

My fingerprints were concave imprints upon wood.

I'd come back. I just couldn't… _be without Bella for another second._ All the time I was gone I wanted her to hate me, or even less than that, I wanted her to forget me, forget I ever existed. I'd tried to rip out--with my hands vilified and horrible and nasty, with my words the most grotesque lies twisting my tongue—any feeling she'd harbored for me, all that love, that light, her laughter, her heart. I'd sent her out to sea, shipwrecked myself, found myself holed up and grounded and fucking _dying_.

There was nothing.

_Castaway._

No family, no friends, no touch, no talking. There was no music, no books, no pleasure. Nothing even remotely as earthly or sensual as her shy kisses and arousing newly minted caresses that had made me want to cry, and take, and mate, and make love to her.

I gave a harsh laugh when people pulled up alongside me on the soft shoulder with their humanity and offers of a ride to their next stop. Did they not understand? I was a vampire, a villain, a vagabond. No longer suave or charming, I didn't even bother with pleasantries; I was hardly cleanly clothed and couldn't give a shit if I still stank after leaving the urine-smelling pit stops of gas station restrooms along the way.

And yet they _welcomed_ me into their cars, and I sat in those bucket seats and sniffed the pine scent of their air fresheners, I slunk down into the passenger side of eighteen wheelers and listened to the crackle of CB radios, I glared out the window as children yipped and griped in the backseats of station wagons with a creature up front beside their moms, dads, grandfathers, aunts.

I was their fucking worst nightmare in the flesh, and they didn't bat an eyelash.

I crawled amongst human life, the monster I was. Unclean, dirtied of soul, neglectful of my appearance, I scurried like vermin; sniping, snipping, offending, being a bastard. The sheer fucking dread was more lethal than wolf or Volturi or capture or dismemberment. Every step was a death march. Every breath my last. Every sight went unseen. All words unspoken, questions unanswered, needs unrequited.

I'd walked away. I'd kept walking. At first I'd run because I knew if she tried to follow me, if she caught up with me, I'd never escape.

_And she would never live._

I'd trudged, like my feet were stuck in mire. My muscles ached with fatigue though of course I was never supposed to be tired of body. How was it my heart curdled, shriveled, compressed like it was being smashed between two behemoth fists?

South, east, north, overseas…It didn't matter.

From a scathing, embittered _old man_ I became just… empty. Hollow, a vessel that had been filled and then spilled of my guts out on a forest floor at the feet of my love.

_Ghost, phantom, my body nothing more than a host I was incapable of killing._

On the days when I needed _something_, I didn't bother to shut out the images, and sounds, and smiles, and bodily feeling of being with Bella.

Usually a month of completely comatose wandering followed those instances. I couldn't compete with the memories, or the way they wracked my being.

I left because I could kill her with the mere brush of my fingers holding too hard at the nape of her fragile neck when all the impulses within me broiled into the heated inescapable molten desire to _be inside of her_. I left because how the hell would I ever be able to consummate this thing, how could I make love to her, _fuck her_, when I could hardly contain my beastly self enough to make-out with her?

I ran, walked, crawled away because anyone could harm her, and the number of possible supernatural suspects who'd want to do just that multiplied exponentially because of our relationship.

I slithered away on my yellow belly because she was human and delicate, because she bled and got sick and coughed and sneezed and could die by accident or from disease or old age.

_Anyone, anything could take her from me._

I slunk away, because I wanted to make her a vampire, because I selfishly wanted her forever.

Jesus Christ, I was such a coward!

All that time, _all… the… time_, I hoped she remembered me, wanted me, longed for me, wondered and waited and wished more than she hated me.

I never thought her life would stop.

_I never figured she'd screw around with other… men._

Down south, someplace muggy, barren, all ochre-colored and tumbled around and poverty-stricken, pot-holed and weed-riddled, I'd looked up at a single plane overhead crossing the wide cloudless blue dome of the sky. Carrying people, joining them, reuniting them. Blinking lowly at the meaty Brahman bull whose black-blue blood congealed around the neat wound I'd scythed, I was utterly detached as its humped back seized with one final, fitful heartbeat.

There was a filthy, formerly shiny, silver Airstream I called home off in the distance. I'd sneered at what my life had become. A cornflower meant Bella's pretty top, her bedspread, the worn cover of her journal. The painted red of a handmade sign was the color of her lips on a cold morning. The brown that surrounded me when it rained was the liquid of her eyes.

Loping to the camper, wearily, I sat on the tilting makeshift step. I didn't look, I couldn't see, I didn't want to want… _I didn't want to need._ Muffled pain needled me until it became the precise incision of ten thousand scalpels slicing my chest, flaying my arms, sharpening on my thighs, _gutting me._ And it all came back in a landslide of memories and stills like photographs. _Every goddamn thing._ All of Bella, and not just freeze frames, but fucking virtual reality so I could feel and hear and there was heat and there was hurt and there was love and there was…

"AAAAHHHHH!" I crashed my head back to the shaky door until it dented and fell, a destroyed metal bulkhead, to the straggling dandelions below.

"Fuck. FUCK!" _Bella._

I pounded the cement steps to dust and rubble and still there was no release from the… from the fucking pressure threatening to crack me open! Panting, I stood from the debris and looked around, and this was foreign, this was alien, this was… _this was wrong._

Three years.

Wasted.

A harrowing narrowing of my face and I felt like I was caving in, aging, deteriorating to a papery-thin man beneath all of the… all of the… _everything I'd destroyed._

A hand to the sun-heated side of the aluminum trailer, I couldn't outrun this hounding.

A fist clasped to my mouth, gagging to see her, for damn sure I knew then, I was going to have her, let her do what she wanted with me. This time Bella wouldn't have to plead for kisses or touches or intimacy or my skin against hers, or conversation or confessions. If she'd have me.

If she wouldn't accept me back then I'd end this ignominious existence once and for all.

I did.

I went back. It was cold. Bella was colder. But I was better even with her noxious, accurate, jibes. And we were older, and maybe this could be our time.

Telling her everything, I'd held her hands, warred with her, embraced her, let her hit me. She'd scorned me, hissed and kicked at me, pitied me, pitied herself. Histrionic, conciliatory, consoling, somber, hysterical.

She forgave my abandonment. I swallowed the intestinal images of her sexual trysts. Believing, slightly, this was our clean slate, we made a home.

But what was the point if _we couldn't grasp the fucking point._

Because we still hurt and stabbed each other coarsely, then we hungered and becalmed bountifully.

We made a home, _and we haunted it_

This was our winter, our spring, then summer. And now, the autumn with its decay.

Limping, beating, beaten…_dying._

_**More?**_

Our hastiness was questioned, never more so than by ourselves.

I thought I'd _abandoned_ her so she could _be_.

And she had been, and I despised that, and I loved that.

Bella looked over at me one morning, her hair a crazy quilt across my pillow, her hand swilling up and down my chest as I lay on my back beside her. I squinted at her through the downy dawn's light on a crisp fall morning when she hooked me with her words, "I could never hate you, Edward. I missed you just _being._"

Rising on an elbow, I lowered so her breasts mashed their cushiony perfection between us, "I love you, Bella." Long and slow and smacking and smiles and tongues, torrid but never rushed, not this time, _this kiss could be us._

Gathering me against her, making us a tight pretzel of limbs grazing and voices melting, Bella licked, whispered, "I looked for you, I loved you. I saw you everywhere you used to be, not knowing, _knowing_. Hoping. In the parking lot and in my driveway and walking, laughing, talking… _scowling._" She quietly laughed, "I looked for you every day, baby."

"That's why-" her eyes were clear, and that was why.

_Because I was everywhere, and I was nowhere, and that was why._

That was why Bella had found forgetfulness the only way possible.

Pushing into her until she sighed and wrapped her legs around my waist and grabbed my ass and smattered kisses up the middle of my chest, I groaned, "We can forget now."

Nodding, arching, reaching, wet and ready and this time we steadied and looked and saw and found…and we were here and we were real and we were each other.

Diffident, afterwards, Bella stiffened and snarled at the chipper birds trilling outside, throwing her pillow at the window and then stealing one of mine, "Ugh! Shut the hell up, it's way too early for this nonsense!"

Wrapping my palm around her calf and pulling it up between my legs, I joked, "You know, this wouldn't be a problem if you didn't need to sleep."

The pillow she held over her face to suffocate the obnoxious birdsong came away, her lips dropped open, she wandered around my body before meeting my eyes with concern, with acceptance, "Yes."

_**No More**_

I never knew if I'd find her railing or rallying.

"_I just wanted you to know how much I fucking loved you!" Bare breasted and gloriously enraged, Bella had hit me with her hips, her lips, her temper, "How could you leave me like that?"_

"_I went by your house. I knew you weren't there, but it didn't matter. Every time I drove down the overgrown path, crushing the tall grass beneath my wheels, as soon as I saw the disrepair and shutters hanging off and mildew spreading and wild roses thorning up the porch, I knew it. I still rang the doorbell, Edward." Spitefully, she stomped around our living room, throwing books and trinkets at me, and I didn't bother to shield myself from the blows of binding or ceramic or wooden statuettes. Her cheeks were mottled red in the most righteous fury, "You were never there!"_

This time, she tested me with a taunt, "You really fucking hate you can't read my mind, don't you."

I inhaled. It would be one of those days.

And I'd fucking take them all, welcomingly, so long as Bella would stay, but I wouldn't put up with any more scorn. I'd done wrong, I'd been a shit, I'd killed us… and right now we needed to resurrect this thing, _this love._

_We'd absolved each other in words and body. But not in spirit._

She twisted the knife until I was screwed up tight, "Probably for the best, anyway."

And I fucking _knew_ what lascivious, wicked things she was remembering… with those men.

All the hashed-up, yardsale glassware scattered and shattered on the floor. I looked to my arm that had swept it away like it was a phantom limb, not belonging to me.

Bella did, _Bella belonged to me._

She ingested the sight of the clacking-stilled shards and walked neatly between them, careful not to cut the bottoms of her bare feet, and the baseboard heater clanged on again, and the sweltering fried-dust smelling air crackled, "What were you really up to all those years, _baby_?" Bella simpered, sweetly, decadently asking for it.

Goading me.

Thinking I'd ever have my cock in another woman.

Clenching my jaw, grinding my teeth, my nostrils flared, "You know I was never with anyone else, _Jesus, Bella._ I was hardly even inside of_ myself_," I bit it out, harshly, my lips curling back. Snarling, grabbing her to me so she could feel every sinew, raging, rigid, turgid, turbulent, and…_repentant, _"I'm sorry."

I softened and she quaked and I calmed and pushed her sweater up and she twisted her fingers right into my hair, yanking me down to her face, "You should be sorry, You LEFT! _I'm sorry you came back._" Her enraged outburst battered to my skin like hailstones. And when she half-turned away, I heard her defeated whisper, "I'm glad you came back."

But her bitterness and bile only reignited, "I looked for you! In every mundane place, _everywhere_, Edward! How could you? How can you? Why?" her stabbing feather-fists punctuated the truth.

Lessened, let loose from the stormy cataclysm, I pulled her into me, I softened, I was… _I was only human, only immortal, only a boy, only a man._

"Yours was the only face I saw, Bella."

"Day in, day out, all night every dammed night."

"I thought of you every day," I placated, pursued my declarations with the littlest kisses anywhere I could find.

Slipping away like an apparition I couldn't contain, Bella's face was filled to overflowing with repugnance at me, "You _thought_ about me every day?"

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

Oh, no. _No, no, no._ I stalked her into a corner and made her listen, swiping the pad of my thumb over her glistening hard lips, making her look at me, "When I say _thought_ I mean I never left you. I never let you go. I wanted to kill myself, more than I wanted to have you. I wanted, _I want_, I need to be with you, Bella! I can't… you never… I couldn't…" Finally my head bowed to her, "I _cannot_ live without you."

A deep breath filled her chest, and she turned her face up as if a sprout to the sun.

"I'll abide your tirades and your past, and I'll own my stupidity that killed us, and I'll accept and I'll give and I will be yours… just, no more, Bella, please, _please, _no more of this."

Beneath the harmless pelt of her small, weakening blows at my chest and cheeks, the only pain I felt was that there would be no release for what I'd done.

"After all these months, I'm not sure it's going to be that easy, baby." She cloaked herself once more.

I wished she could bash me to a bloody pulpy mess on our kitchen floor, at least so I could forego the disgusting montage I manifested of Bella with other men.

She'd accepted me, and I her. But it wasn't that simple.

She'd come to live with me and be my lover.

But it was never going to be that fucking easy.

I'd hastened to do the same, to inter the swampy sexuality of her years without me.

I never knew what I'd find in her presence. Pique, pathos, unadulterated venom.

Every toxin-filled curse I'd heard for over a century raped me.

Justly.

And as rightfully, I was angered!

How could she judge when she'd given her body – the one that was made to be mine – to other men.

"Listen to me, Bella!" I shouted and held her wrists before she could turnstile on me.

My incisors wet, breath sweet and sultry, I strove her closer, until our hips met, and antagonism gave way to anticipation.

My lip furled, "None of that shit matters now."

Trying to remember tenderness, I turned into her body, gently, slowly. Shadows of late afternoon fall sun gloried about us.

Made us less fallow, less fallen.

_In and out._

Wrong.

Right.

She cried, in voice only, against my neck, pushing my shirt up over my arms, shoulders, neck, head, "You _left_ me, Edward."

Biting my lips, scraping without injury over the plains of my chest, she crowed, "And it does fucking matter, _love._"

"Yeah?" I sucked her earlobe into my mouth and ran my hand up her woolen skirt to find the moist silk of her panties, "More than this?"

_Slap!_

She spun out from me, but I held her hand.

She looked to our braided fingers like they were unrecognizable, mortal snakes coiling. Sneering, "You can't just fuck the hurt out of me."

"No?" I let her go, but I was done apologizing. She owed, I owed, we'd both hurt, and this was getting us nowhere. A stop-gap.

"This it then?" My fists bunched at my hips.

When she didn't answer but for a glare, I opened my jeans and lowered them, aching as she feasted her eyes over me.

The muscles all over me racked inside of her seductive gaze. I groaned, opened my palms to her, and asked her as she had me so many times over it was burnt into my brain, "_Please._ Bella."

Her indecision solidified into bile. I hated that look on her face, all hard plains, no matter how much it was deserved.

I'd make love to her until all that passed her expression was the collapse of knowing, the eruption of lust.

Her lacey, sheer, brassiere met the cupboard. My mouth opened, greedily.

"Sex isn't the answer," yet her legs opened and her nipples, those fucking glorious dimes topped up into the prettiest, most sexy pieces of flesh.

"What is then?"

I strode to her. Ran the flat of my hand over her tits.

"_Hmmm?"_

Her neck arched away, but her hips swayed and the slight fabric was easily shimmied to the floor, and then to the skirting in a heap of frills.

Hands that could never hurt found the strength to stroke. Up and down my chest. All over my shoulders. Into my pelvis and across my pubic hair. _Down, down, down._

"_Jesus Hell!"_ I moaned and begged and braced my legs. My cock pointed straight at her, wanting her touch. I moved against air alone.

"Bella, _please."_ I implored. And I'd fucking do it again.

"You wanna' know the answer?"

Deliriously, I opened my eyes. Stilled. All my being centered on Bella.

She took up her hair in her hands--cinnamon, paprika, the crusty rusty red flakes of blood upon a doe's fawny neck. All of it. _Fucking tease._

"Tell me now," I demanded. I was done playing.

Before her lips crashed to mine, and her hair became a spicy waterfall to her shoulders in tendrils and waves and locks over her back and between her breasts and into my hands like a gift, _a fucking gift,_ I felt the word breathed into my soul, from her to me, "_Love."_

All our fingers plaited into her mane, our lips pouted together, our tongues tangled, retreated, bartered, mated.

When she sat down on her heels, I growled.

Lips of succulence and redness robbed me of vision, sanity.

When I tried to caress her face, wind her tresses into my fingers, she shook her head, and I still felt only her exhalations on my cock.

Instead of kissing my penis, in lieu of tonguing it, sucking it, she watched as I jerked closer to the purchase of her mouth.

"_I love you, Bella. I always ha-"_ The word tore off from my throat as I watched her wrap the length of her hair around my erection. I gasped, groaned, "_Ahh,_ I always have-" Once more my thoughts ceased with my voice. Her tongue ran around the head of my cock and then pointed into the slit. And she continued to twirl her hair, those silken vibrant skeins, in spirals around my cock. When she took me down into her throat, I pounded the counter to crushed granite, its sooty glittering grains like starbursts in the sun's last rays, "_FUCK!_ I will always love you, Bella."

"You're damn right you will."

Even though my balls were so firm and ready and scritching higher, and I was ready to come in her mouth, I laughed.

She was right.

It was about time we faced facts.

Past didn't matter.

Future would unfold.

The _point_ was we were equals. Each other's firm footing… as we never would have been before. We could be now.

We'd been tested and tortured and torn. We'd always loved each other, but never like this. Now it was time to lay those demons to rest, put them in a tomb, mark it with a gravestone, throw dirt on it and decide, once and for all… _this was it._

_**Yes, forevermore**_

_And this was us._

"Yes," she'd said.

"Just fucking do it already," she'd sworn, scared and impatient and needing to be touched and naked and sublime and the most of every goddamn thing.

"I don't want you to die in pain, Bella." I'd watched the run of blood inside her veins, bluish, brackish, pumping harder, calling me, beckoning.

Undressing herself, undressing me, she'd wrested all the material away from us so that what remained was bare and cold, and bare and hot, and beatific and beastly, unrefined, defined, devilish, decadent, delirious, delicious… to sex, to love, to kill, to enkindle.

"Then don't let me die, baby. _And make me feel pleasure._ Make me feel pleasure _first,_" because she wasn't so ignorant anymore.

Clasping my face with one hand that didn't quiver in fear--or nearly didn't--smoothing her fingers from my pelvis to my cock, she handled me, and I was ready, and I was heady, and I was… _giddy. _And _I _was scared.

"Just do it," she demanded.

"It's not that easy," I reprimanded.

"It can be, right?" she parried.

We had decided, it should be…_easier._

Laying her on the bed, licking and sucking and nibbling and beginning to get a feel for her flavor beneath skin, wondering what her blood would taste like right down to bone and marrow, I swept my face through another wetness, one that was musky and slick and sometimes a thick and creamy unguent that almost fulfilled my craving hunger for her.

But with _this_ before me, her giving, her assurance, my want, me need, our future, all of her laid out, I wasn't satisfied this time with the scorching drink between her thighs.

My eyes turned blacker than midnight, blacker than forgotten souls wandering aimlessly about that midnight hour, blacker than the coals left over from hell's inferno.

Bucking restlessly, Bella met my fiendish look squarely, ran her toes along my shoulders, gave them to me, one-by-one, to suckle. Her other calf punted me forward, on my knees before her, between her, languidly parting her delta with my cock. Pushing in, _an inch_, retreating, _a smidgen_.

Bending her legs around my waist, clasping the small of her back and raising her up, lifting her for the incineration to come, I teased her before I bled her.

Tipping her head over my arms, her breasts washing against me and latching my nipples with hers and stopping and swaying and sliding, she was more savage than me, "Just do it! Fuck me, have me! Make me, _make me… make me into something…"_ I thrust into her completely, holding down on her hip and shoulder, "_Ohhhh, yes, just make me something to be!"_

That was wrong, this was wrong, "You already are something to be." I tried to disengage, set her aside, pull my dick out of her, but she was so fucking forceful when she took my lips and swiveled on my hips and rallied and panted, "_I know that! _I just… we can't," she decanted over me a few times, languorously, "I want… _we need."_ Her kiss had softened to slippery, and tongues and teeth and tethering urges and strident gasps, "_We'll never be… unless we're together."_

And I understood, but I couldn't. At the base of her neck I tasted her flesh, knowing a flick of muscle, a turn of hands, a soft, soft cut of my teeth, and I'd have her, "I can't."

Inside I was hungry because I could see… _I could see… _I could _feel_ her blood running through _my veins_ filling my stomach, and the sensation bloated me, made me bleat, angered me and I wanted to crush her and fuck her and love her and have her and make her… and _make her and make love to her and take her and make her._

My chin that would never feel stubble scrubbed her face, her lips and eyes and nose, and Bella kissed it all, kissed it all away with her mouth, with her tears that were falling and falling, "Please just… I will, I will Bella." Curling her up into me so every part meshed and roiled and we were fucking again and I was in her hard and she was over me tight, "I will, but let me make love to you like this, one more time."

Her nod became a loll and an, _"Ahhhh,"_ and it was gentle, tender, poignant feeling. For love and us and trust and not more hate and no more beating and just, just, just us once more, _one final time._

Even when I arched and cried out and lunged up and my voice broke, _"Oh god yes, Bella, yessss, I love,"_ I shifted to the side and sifted in and out quickly, feeling her perched on my thighs, across my chest, anchored over me, anchoring me, and flying up and lifting and spilling and yelling and kissing, laughing, kissing, wishing, knowing.

The flutter of her pussy, her beautiful little inner flower, made me grip her too hard because another flow pulsed between us. She held the pain I caused, only letting it escape to a bite on her bottom lip, a frown on her brow that skittered away like clouds, frail skeletal clouds and blue sky.

Soothing, remaining inside her, rolling down but not away, her breath slowed, mine increased.

Pretty, disheveled, sensual, Bella turned and opened up to me… a floweret, an efflorescence, her tone still husky and deep like the satchels of pollen carried away by a honey bee, "Only you can pin me down, Edward."

A smile, a gut wrenching smile.

I snubbed her nose and sloughed her lips and made the gentlest, cruelest caress of my palm, twining her hair away from her neck, off her breasts, shifting her with hands tender and brutal so I could take her in another manner.

"I want you to fly, love." How much my face clamped down, crinkled, and I was dying… I was dying… I was going to kill her… _I was dying to kill her._

Because I smelled her and I wanted her and I wanted to taste her and I wanted to lick inside her neck and down between her tits and even right between her legs, and maybe, probably, behind her knees, _and I still wanted her to live._

"Only you know me, only you can keep me, here with you."

I shook my head in denial even while I trained my teeth to the fat, succulent dripping artery down her neck.

She held my hands, a downy persuasion of fingertips right down to where our fingers met palms, it was caring and encouraging, and the exact amount of eroticism, as her fingers slid back and forth between mine, just as I'd done inside her cunt.

"Do it, do it now before I remember all the reasons we shouldn't, why this is wrong, why I've hated you. Do it while I _know_ I can love you effortlessly even while there's hurt and pain and work to come. Do it while I remember," she took our threaded hands to her lips, blessed them with a smoldering kiss, "I have _only_ ever loved you."

Luxurious salty wet streams, tears, soon-to-be-forgotten dreams dripped and dropped and pooled in the corner of my mouth, inside my ear, down my throat.

Distressed, chilled, clammy, I tried to dry our cheeks, but it was futile.

"What if I don't stop?"

Throwing out her breasts, Bella admonished, "It doesn't take a genius to know… _you'll kill me._" Her bravado leaked away, _dripping dropping again_, "You won't. _You won't, will you?_"

I couldn't.

How could I?

Her tits still jostling against me, I wanted, "Can I start here?" Jet, onyx, famished again, and half human, and half mongrel, and inside and outside and _now, _I scraped her nipples.

As if my teeth were erogenous tools, and not the implements of a killer, Bella broke out in goose bumps, "_Yes, now."_

I took my time, because this was not a meal. She was not food. Bella was all the energy in my world, like a Black Hole exploding, nebulas imploding, falling stars, shooting stars, comets. Flicking, I enjoyed it. I felt horrible for that. Fear and excitation made her tremble like a dewy cobweb at dawn when touched by the merest fingertip.

My pinky surrounded her aureole.

And sliced inside.

Blood dimpled the circumference.

My venom had numbed her, briefly, but as she bled in the smallest most alluring bubbles of crimson against cream, my sight too bled from bullion to gullion and rubied starving red.

I lapped quickly, speedily, and with a last pull on her nipple, I left her chest to follow a bitten, bitten, bitten path up her neck and down to her inner thigh. Femoral, carotid, to get the job done now hastily.

Fast, I tore open and sewed shut.

I choked, there was blood seeping everywhere, I was tearing too fast!

Concentrating, because to lose focus would mean I'd shove my fingers down into her viscera--_and she was my lover, my mate--_sop up the squelching sanguine ocean and stick my face inside a gaping irreparable wound.

_I was that close._

With my poison, I shaved off Bella's mortality. Making it a salve, I bound her to immortality.

Sinking down upon sighs and exclamations and the simplest, basest lust, she would scream next.

In agony.

She did. Cried and screamed and bled and seized and her body wanted to catapult off the bed. She screeched and railed and rallied and wept and broke me… _fucking broke me._ Bella coiled into a ball like a fetus inside of a womb, but there was no mother's love or umbilical cord lashing her to life.

Just me, just death.

Lashing out, she recoiled from my mitigating malfeasance.

I hated, and haunted, and laid upon her as her body broke, her bones snapping with every jolt of venom raiding her veins, leaking, filling, joining, mending.

I knew I couldn't hurt her still, but I held her like the delicate, porcelain being she'd been, just cradling her, swaddling her in my arms, "You'll fucking live through this, my love," I promised her and made myself believe it.

I tore my hair and trounced the room and ripped off the valance and waited…and waited… _and waited._

Silence guided me back to her bedside. Our bed. It was a sick and deadly catafalque. The offering: Bella.

A gust, a jut, an arc, a tug of crisp burning air took up her implacable lungs and the sheet shifted down to her knees.

Coming alive, she was dead.

Becoming dead, she'd never been more alive.

Leaping aside, she hunkered and strafed her claret eyes. _Animal_.

A strict gasp escaped her, "Edward, I-"

She stopped because her voice had changed to a thing of bells, chiming. Carillons, church towers, medieval canticles.

And chambers, dusty.

The chamber of her heart, muzzled.

Ungainly, unwieldy, she clambered against the shelf that held our yard sale bric-a-brac until it all smacked and clattered and broke into fragments like all the dinner plates I'd thrown off our table not one month before, and she yelped.

_Until_ the glass and ceramic was made pretty little shards by her heels and soles.

Slivers that bounced away from her steps.

Rainbows and prisms glinted as glass showered with every pace.

There was quiet coming.

She'd not changed, not at all, apart from the glaring throbbing strobe of her reddened orbs.

And the sparkle on her skin.

She was the same woman I'd always known.

A vessel of humanity poured out, filled in, but she pounded to me, swimming, swilling, too fast, clasping, soaring, breathing, wondering, "Edward, I-"

She stopped.

"You."

I shook my head and hoarsely cried, "You."

Her brow crinkled, "Me?"

Anxious, I held my hands up because…_was she?_ "Bella, are you?"

Triumph creased her lips, "Me."

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

Lifting her arms, she soared, _she soared to me_. And the worry, the doubts, the disgust, the abrasion, the taking and leaving and giving and left wanting, the waning, the injury, the smell, the feel, the fuel… it all ignited into a veritable fireball between us!

Mocking, smoking, hazy clouds exploded and left us clear, and clean and real and true and eternal and love and lovers and blessed and pure and mates and souls and ancient, especial, pacified, dead.

_Together._

Alive.

And there were tongues and touches and too rough and hold me now and fuck me like this because you will never think you'll hurt me again, and _why did you wait so long,_ why was I longing? Why did I stop this, how could I ever, why, why?

Why not.

_Because love, love, love. Essence and ending and beginning and life and death and fragility and forcefulness and ownership and possession and jealousy and scared, so scared. Sacred, forever._

"Forever?"

"Always."

Not then, never, no.

Of course not.

Just now.

_Just here and right and peace and… she was hungry._

And sensuous.

And sybaritic.

And unending.

And thirsty.

And hugging.

And guiding, _guiding her to food and watching her hunt and glut and swipe through herds and… always looking towards me._

And being.

And fucking.

And fucking.

And making love… _all night long, for all the nights the universe held in her hands._

Because.

Because.

_Forever._

…_._Just because. _Forever._

_End._

_

* * *

_

~I want to thank you for reading. I'm a little weepy because it's the end, right? I'd love to hear what you thought~


End file.
